(Today’s re-posting of this article — first published on the DI/AV in 2006 as the Johnston Letter, Volume 2, Number 2 — in conjunction with the Museum of Modern art exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, is sponsored by Slippery Rock Dance . Like what you’re reading? Please consider making a donation to the DI/AV today by designating your donation through PayPal to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to learn how to donate by check.)

I had a one-person organization a few years ago called FUM, meaning Fed Up [With] Media. I got the word from “Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishmun.” It would be a cover for writing letters to media objecting to everything. But I never did. I’m agitated enough just trying to sleep at night. A friend called me and said, “What’re you up to?” and I said, “Surviving.” Driving down the West Side Highway, I told Ingrid, who keeps changing lanes and racing cars a lot newer than ours, “I seriously don’t feel well.” Having established that, I looked ahead and noticed an SUV license plate right in front of us. It said “SURVIVOR.” I took it personally. After talking quite a bit with people about medical issues, I made up a fantasy organization that I haven’t tried to name. I see the country crisscrossed by networks of friends and families, online printouts in hand, filibustering to help each other survive the medical profession. And of course the insurance companies which have sold us down their rivers. At my gym one day, I accosted a young man wearing a bright green T-shirt with white lettering reading, “I am a doctor, don’t trust me,” asking him if he was in fact a doctor. He was, he said, smiling broadly and meaningfully. It’s nice to see art work in the gym. While I was watching The View the other morning, admittedly a really decadent thing to be looking at, esp. at 11 a.m., I had a FUM moment. The View is that unscripted free-for-all kaffeeklatch of four or five women led by the ageless Barbara Walters. Barbara was regaling her three fellow klatchers, who sort of huddle together parabolically on a couch or around a table constantly interrupting each other, with the great time she had had at the White House amongst the Kennedys celebrating the Special Olympics. She had been one of a hundred privileged guests. Special Olympics is a body we all hail and believe in, but Barbara’s explanation of how it came into being was scandalously omissive, and touched on one of my noir issues, i.e., the one where I can’t bear what happened to someone I never knew, and where media collude in covering it up. Barbara had to say that Rosemary Kennedy, the first daughter and third child of Joseph and Rose, was the inspiration for these Olympics, but she could hardly say what happened to Rosemary — that she had been retarded and behaviorally problematic, a potential embarrassment to her ambitious father, and was lobotomized (in 1941) and subsequently put away forever in her new vegetative state. Not that this is not common knowledge. But the subject on The View was not Rosemary or even the Special Olympics or for that matter the Kennedys; it was Barbara’s career-enhancing inclusion in a White House party, thus advertisement for The View. Anyway lobotomy would raise questions of madness, which would hang in the air like string theories. Had I been in the audience of The View, I would have interrupted the klatch and declaimed the truth, then been bounced right out of the show onto the tarmac on my arthritically inflamed foot. But then, I would never be in such an audience. Movement is required, for a start. You have to get there. In the 1970s, I was pretty active. I went to a Women and Madness (book title) party wearing a “Certified Insane” sign. I had been feuding with the feminist author of the book because I thought I knew more about the subject than she did. I wasn’t too mature then. But I did know more about the subject, having actually been mad. My sign was the picket type, reading “Certified Insane” front and back in big magic letters. The author was so threatened and upset that she called the cops, I guess for disorderly conduct, certainly not for breaking the First Amendment. In my memory the cops never came, or I left before they did. I was not the sort of activist who solicited arrest. As for art work or activity, it was never a feminist interest, except when the movement turned its attention to women who were artists. Down in the equatorial dumps yesterday, I was complaining to JM on the phone from California, who wisely summed up our times, saying, “We’re in a terminal period of awfulness.” It’s in this gloom that I have kept shambling along looking for a doctor for my foot, like Diogenes bent over his upheld lantern in broad daylight searching for one honest man. The foot is not popular with doctors. It’s too far away from the heart, the organ of course of medical preference. It’s far away altogether from world concerns, the blood of the Englishmun. At 11 p.m. one evening I caught Charlie Rose on PBS schmoozing with his guests Bill Gates and wife along with Warren Buffett who had just contributed an indecent amount of money to the Gates Foundation. I like Gates and his philanthropic spirit — I always wonder where exactly the money goes (if I had any money and contributed it to something I would accompany it right to its announced destination to see if it got there and if so who handles it and how) — and now I suppose I have to like Buffett too. But Rose’s real subject was not the desperate global plights to be alleviated by these new billions, but Rose himself as a friend of his fabulously wealthy guests. You know this as you watch him descend to unmitigated vulgarity, making his guests laugh with him over things mysteriously private (undiscovered no doubt even by them, or by the perpetrator, Rose), as they are forced to engage figuratively in sucking each other off. Now what you are watching are three schoolkids (leaving the wife out of this — she appeared to stay on point), laughing over their impossible mission. And you thought it was about saving the world. So FUM them. I wake up yelling sometimes. I had a Katrina-type dream. I’m one of Thoreau’s masses, leading a quietly desperate life. In our final phase of empire, I see Nero with his banjo everywhere, and the flames licking our skylines. I see GW talking about how “sad,” how “pathetic,” the new violence in the Middle East is! I read about “our shamelessly narrow definition of ‘torture.'” I get into a conveyor belt situation at a clinic to see a rare type of doctor, a foot surgeon. First you check in with a woman at a high wooden desk that surrounds her, and she isn’t smiling. At that moment, you should walk right back out. Heck, I can still walk. I just walk minimally, and with help, to avoid the pain it can cause. At the end of the beltway, not a single functionary en route smiling, I waited with Ingrid in a large bare square office for the surgeon, who when at last he came told me surgery is not a good idea, that I don’t look my age, and I should see a neurologist. They hand you around like a plate of cookies. On our way out I saw scads of overweight dejected looking people waiting their turn on lines of chairs, gazing vacantly, mouths slightly open, surely stupefied by drugs. Next I went to a doctor of anesthesiology/pain management, an intriguing-sounding specialty. He would inject me with the bad stuff I want, but I could tell he wasn’t going to care about me. That’s the only specialty that matters to me. He gave me a prescription for a drug called Neurontin, and after reading the list of its side effects I threw the whole three-dollar vial of 90 Neurontins out. Then I went back to the only doctor I’ve met who looks into your eyes with kindness, and who I hope to designate my de facto primary physician. He smiles gently in the long-suffering style, and under his white coat wears subtly mismatching ties and shirts. He’s clearly a man of art. He took my foot warmly in his hands and said you have to start using it more because it’s getting osteoporotic. And he can give me bad stuff in a way that won’t kill me. However I would never forsake the help or advice of friends. I’m very sad that Neno, our flower-store friend, sold his shop and is moving on, but Ingrid saw him on the street this morning and he told her to tell Jill to walk 500 steps every day. What a great idea! I’m going to try it. I’m so mature! Later on in the 1970s, quite a while after my “Certified Insane” episode, I did something that called out the cops again, but this time it changed my life. It was not one of my more artful events; in fact to be frank it was an act of pure violence. I was visiting the Fallsburg New York headquarters of a major guru, having accompanied a devotee there. Standing in line to be “blessed” by a bunch of peacock feathers wielded in air around your head by the guru, I ducked out of the way when I saw it coming. Later, alone in the huge dining room, I suddenly, and with no sublunar reason that I can conjure up, propelled with a mighty push a tall pile of dinner plates off a table onto the floor. They crashed and fractured into a winning mass of rubble, bringing me to the attention of the meditation authorities, who called the cops. I retreated in haste to the parking lot, and lurked invisibly around my mgb, waiting for my devotee friend. Two older women standing together materialized in front of me, about 20 yards away. One I recognized as the poet and potter MC Richards, who turned to her companion and told her who I was, using the epithet, “troublemaker.” Troublemaker! Such a common tag. After that, I stopped acting out in public. And so life goes on, said Gertrude in her book on Picasso. It may all be a lotta who shot John, i.e. a lotta hooey, as Judge Judy sometimes yells at her losers. Judy is abusive and awful, and I could FUM her to death. But where did she get this pearl?